Charlie Darwin, or The Trine of 1809 (Stories in the Ether) Read online

  Charlie Darwin, or The Trine of 1809

  by Angel Leigh McCoy

  A “Stories in the Ether” Book from Nevermet Press

  Charlie Darwin, or the Trine of 1809

  Copyright © 2011 by Angel Leigh McCoy

  Published by Nevermet Press, LLC 2011

  Editing, Layout & Design by Jonathan Jacobs

  Original Cover Illustration and all Interior Illustrations created by Steven Austin. All artwork copyright © 2011 Steven Austin.

  All Rights Reserved.

  A Nevermet Press Book

  Nevermet Press, LLC

  14007 Parkvale Road

  Rockville, MD 20853

  www.nevermetpress.com

  This book is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced (except for review purposes) without the prior written consent of the publisher. Material published herein may not necessarily reflect the opinions of Nevermet Press, LLC, its owner or its contributors and are not liable for opinions expressed herein. Most product names are trademarks owned by the companies that publish those products. Use of the name of any product without mention of trademark status should not be construed as a challenge to such status.

  Kindle Edition

  “...the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.”

  — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.

  Chapter 1

  “What in tarnation?”

  The strange words awakened young Charlie Darwin. He wasn’t positive what they meant, spoken as they were with unfamiliar inflection, but he got the gist. Charlie pushed up on one elbow and gawped. He lay on the deck of a galleon constructed and carved of dark wood. It swayed and swashed as if afloat.

  A bean-pole of a boy with ragged brown hair was pacing back and forth, his unpolished boots thudding upon the deck. He was the one who had spoken.

  Another boy lay on the deck next to Charlie. He slept, eyes closed, mouth open, snoring a wheezy little snore. He wore a black suit and had hair as slick as a raven’s feathers.

  Charlie spied a man on the quarter deck, standing at the helm, attention focused on adjusting a set of brass levers. He wore white from head to toe, including cowboy boots, a European-style cloak, a knee-length Templar tunic (slit to reveal fringed chaps) and a ten-gallon hat on his head. The wind whipped his cloak out behind him and flattened the tunic to his thighs.

  Charlie’s perusal of the man was curtailed by a thunderous whoosh from overhead. He ducked, covered his ears, and looked up. Where he had expected to see sails pulled taut by the wind, he found a trio of white balloons tethered to the boat with criss-crossing ropes. It took a moment for the sight to sink in and for his brain to analyze what he was seeing, but only a moment. In the next instant, he was up and running to the deck railing so he could look out over the ocean. It was there, vast and blue-gray, but it was far, far below.

  Charlie sat down and wrapped his arms around his knees.

  “You okay?” asked the tall, thin boy.

  “I don’t like heights.”

  The other boy patted Charlie on the shoulder. “Sorry about that.” He plopped down too. “You’re awake.”

  “That remains to be seen,” Charlie said. “Who are you? Where in Hell am I? And how did I get here?”

  “I dunno,” the boy replied, then stopped to correct himself. “I mean, I know who I am. What I don’t know is where we are or how we got here. I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Name’s Abe. Abe Lincoln. Now you.”

  Charlie frowned. “Are you from Lincolnshire?”

  “I ain’t never heard of that. I’m originally from Kentucky, currently residing in Spencer County, Indiana.”

  Charlie had never met anyone with an accent like this boy’s. Based on Abe’s attire, he presumed the boy to be an uneducated peasant. He tipped his head. “I’m Charles Robert Darwin of the Shrewsbury Darwins.”

  Abe picked up Charlie’s hand and shook it. “Charles Robert Darwin?” Abe spoke with a particular relishing of the R’s. “That’s a mouthful, ain’t it? I’m gonna call you Charlie. Is Shrewsbury in Virginia?”

  Charlie pulled his hand away and scrunched his upper lip. “Virginia? No. It’s in England.”

  “Ooh, ain’t you a long way from home.”

  Charlie corrected him. “Aren’t you a long way from home?”

  “Seeing as how I live nowhere near the ocean, I’d have to say yes.”

  “No,” said Charlie. “I mean—”

  The other boy, the one dressed in the black wool suit, came to life. He went from prone straight into crawling on all fours. He scuttled about until he found a dark corner, and then he knelt there, hands knitting at his chin, eyes skittish.

  “Whoa there, fella,” said Abe.

  Charlie looked at the boy. “By all evidence, I’d have to conclude that you don’t know where we are either.”

  The boy in the corner shook his head. “Am I kidnapped?” he asked.

  Abe tilted his head and pooched out his lower lip. “That remains to be seen, my friend. I don’t remember getting an invitation, so I’m thinking we ain’t honored guests.”

  “Aren’t honored guests,” Charlie said.

  Abe gave him a sour look. “That’s what I said.”

  “No,” countered Charlie. “What you said was that we ain’t honored guests. You’re butchering the King’s English.”

  “Well, I don’t answer to no king, and I sure as snot don’t answer to you.”

  Charlie and Abe stared at one another. Charlie looked away first.

  Abe stood and crossed to the third boy. “Don’t you fret. We’ll figure this out together. Folks call me Abe.” He stuck out his hand.

  The other boy cringed back from it.

  Abe left it out there. “Way I look at it, this is gonna be one heck of a tall tale to tell when we get back home. This here’s Charlie. What’s your name?”

  The boy looked from the one to the other, evaluating them. He said, “Eddie. Eddie Poe.” He shook Abe’s hand only at the last and only with the tips of his fingers. “What chicanery is this?” he asked. “What artifice? Have I gone insane? Perhaps I’m fae-touched. Or, perhaps I dream.”

  Abe put his hands on his hips and surveyed the deck. “Or I’m having a nightmare, and y’all are in it.” He sighed.

  “You know,” said Charlie. “I’ve read about airships like this, though I’ve never seen one quite so big. They use hot air for lift. Hot air rises because it’s of a lesser density than cooler air. It’s scientific.”

  Eddie nodded toward the man in white. “Who’s that?”

  The man in white growled and beat his fist—in a very unscientific manner—against a dial. After the third hit, a pop split the air, and the ship shifted to one side.

  Eddie screeched. The boys all reached for handholds.

  The daylight grew brighter, as if a cloud had released the sun. Warmth accompanied the light, and though the boys had to blink against the glare, they lifted their faces to the sky.

  Charlie said, “Maybe we should ask that man what he’s about. It’s logical, since he’s at the helm of this ship, that he would know the answers to our questions.”

  “If you’ll pardon the expression,” said Abe, “I’d say there ain’t no reason to rock the boat until we’re back on the ground.”

  Charlie rubbed his
brow. “I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for this.”

  “Maybe we’re dead.”

  The other two boys gaped at Eddie.

  “That man could be the ferry man,” suggested the raven-haired boy. “He’ll want a penny from each of us, if so.”

  Charlie snorted, “Poppycock.” He didn’t sound as convinced as he’d have liked. “If we were dead, we’d go straight to Heaven. We’re children, after all. Children have angels that come for them and carry them to Heaven.”

  “I reckon he could be an angel.”

  Three faces lifted toward the man in white, and they studied the possibly divine driver in silence.

  Charlie had to admit, even to himself, that the man could have been God’s reaper. The thought, however, galled him. “If I’m dead,” he said, “then how did I die?”

  No one had an answer to that, and it mattered not at all anyway, for at just that moment, the boat dropped. The sudden descent lifted the boys an inch off the deck. They clung to their handholds and to each other, screaming together in fright.

  Brief blasts of fire heated the air in the three balloons, first one, then the next, then the last, and so on, and so forth, adjusting the balance of the boat with notches, niggles, and nudges. The aft-most balloon made a sibilant suspiration. It was joined by the centermost balloon’s syncopated hisses. Synchronized susurrations from the foremost balloon shaped the sounds into a fracas of fuss raised in protest against the descent to earth. The clouds overhead lifted farther and farther away.

  The boys clung.

  The bottom of the boat bumped against something hard and knocked them off-balance.

  The balloon-song drifted down into silence.

  The boat came to rest.

  In the waiting moment that followed, the boys remained still and hesitant. Abe was the first to speak, and he said, “I sure woulda thought that the ride to Heaven woulda been smoother’n that.”

  ∞

  The man in white began locking down levers and adjusting lines on the balloons.

  Abe stood at the rail and looked out at the countryside. It was as green as Kentucky, the hills rolling off into the distance with nothing to interrupt them. “This might be our chance,” he told the others. They climbed up beside him and looked too.

  Charlie asked, “Our chance for what?”

  “For escape,” Abe peered over the edge with an evaluating eye.

  “That’s too far to jump,” said Eddie.

  “It might be too far to jump, but it ain’t too far to climb. Look.” Abe pointed to a rope ladder that lay folded upon the deck.

  “Quickly,” said Eddie. He rushed to the rope ladder. A glance over his shoulder told him the man in white had crouched down behind the helm. “Now!”

  Together, Eddie and Abe picked up the rope ladder and tossed it over the edge.

  Abe climbed over first. Eddie went over behind him. They made it down and looked back.

  Charlie was perched on the rail, straddling it, and looking down at them with trepidation. He shook his head.

  “C’mon,” hissed Abe. He signaled with his whole arm.

  Charlie looked down at the rope ladder and put his foot on the first rung, then shook his head and slid back into the boat. He had fear written all over his face.

  Eddie and Abe saw the man in white crossing the deck.

  “He’s coming!” Abe didn’t bother to keep his voice low.

  Eddie put his hands on his head. “It’s easy! Just take it one step at a time! Hurry!”

  Charlie looked over his shoulder, and his expression changed from trepidation to terror. He slid over the edge and scrambled down the ladder like a seasoned sailor—almost. Near the bottom, he took a misstep and his foot went through a hole. He flubbed and slid downward, flipped upside down and ended up entangled, hanging by one leg and shouting for help.

  Abe and Eddie rushed to him. They lifted and twisted him, pulled and pushed.

  “Boys!” cried the man in white, appearing over the rail. Through his Prussian accent, it came out sounding more like, “Bawz!” He continued, “There is no point in running. Stay where you are. I will be down in a minute.” He disappeared again.

  Charlie didn’t come easily off the rope ladder, and by the end of it, all three boys had tumbled to the ground in a jumble of arms and legs.

  “You are not hurt?” asked a grown-up, Prussian voice.

  The boys looked up, frozen in mid-tangle, to find the man in white had joined them. Up close, his face was pockmarked, wind-burned, and sun-bleached. A dusting of silver mingled, at the temples, with his otherwise auburn hair. He lined his jaw with a neat beard. It exaggerated the broadness of his face, especially in the absence of a mustache. He had ice-blue eyes and bushy red eyebrows that reminded Eddie of fox carcasses frozen alongside two wintry pools.

  In one arm, the man carried a child with a white scarf that wrapped over its head and around its nose and mouth, obscuring its identity. It was little more than a pair of obsidian eyes peering out at them from the hood.

  It took some time to disentangle themselves, but when all was said and done, no one reported any lasting damage.

  “Too bad,” said the man in white, almost under his breath. He towered over them. “Gentlemen, welcome to Avalon. I hope you will find your stay here as useful as I will.” He headed up the grassy hillside.

  “Hey!” Abe took off after him. “Wait a cotton-picking minute! Who in blazes are you, and why are we here?” He fell into pace alongside the man. Charlie and Eddie joined them a moment later, half-running to keep up with the man’s long legs.

  Eyes on the horizon, the man said, “I am Pope Innocent the Fourteenth, also known as the White Pope, the Pope of the New World, the Papal Gunslinger and the savior of humanity. But, you may call me ‘Your Holiness’.” Without breaking stride, he made three gestures, each the same, each directed at one of the three boys.

  They crested the first hill, and the view stopped the boys in their tracks. They stood side-by-side, staring into a shallow valley. A brook ran through it, connecting a series of three lagoons, the first a triangle, the second a circle, and the third a square. Beyond, there stood a palace the likes of which the boys had never seen. The front gleamed in the sunlight, sparkling even more than the water. It was a mish-mash of styles, like building blocks stacked together in any which way. As they watched, one portion of the structure lifted and moved to a new location, the puzzle rearranging as easily as if it had been on the floor of God’s playroom.

  A geometric pattern of flower beds—angles on cubes and curves on spheres—surrounded the palace with Euclidean simplicity, the hedges trimmed with precision, the flowering trees carefully plotted.

  The White Pope had continued on without them. Halfway down the hill toward the palace, he called without looking back, “Come along. Your fairy princess awaits your arrival.”

  ∞

  The aroma of cut clover, gardenia and jasmine tantalized the boys’ senses. It grew stronger the closer they got. As they approached the outer edge of the garden, they hesitated.

  The White Pope was making his way along a path between two lagoons toward the palace. Other people were emerging from inside and mingling there.

  “We could make a run for it,” suggested Abe.

  “And go where?” asked Charlie. “We’re as lost now as Finette Cendron ever was. Until a path to escape reveals itself, I fear we’re trapped.”

  Eddie said, “Those people look friendly. Perhaps, they’ll help us if we tell them we’re being held against our will.”

  Up ahead, the White Pope shouted something the boys didn’t catch. They heard his voice ring out and saw heads lift to look in their direction.

  A moment later, Charlie cried out in pain and surprise. He bucked forward and put his hand to his bottom, turning in place in an attempt to see behind himself. “Something bit me!”

  Eddie yelped and put his hand to his ear, eyes gone buggy and wild. “Ow!”

  The
boys huddled together. Eddie held up one hand. “I’m bleeding!”

  “Better get moving,” said a tiny voice.

  Abe spun in place. “Who said that?”

  “I did.” A strange creature hovered like a hummingbird in front of Abe’s face. It was human in general design, female, from head to toe the size of a newborn kitten, with dragonfly wings attached at its shoulder blades. They buzzed, keeping the creature aloft. It wore no clothes, and it had a chameleon-like tail that curled toward the front, longer and fatter than either of its legs.